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Pronunciamiento emitido el 10 de marzo de 2022 por el pueblo Shipibo ante la sentencia del Tribunal Constitucional del Perú en el caso de la comunidad de Santa Clara de Uchunya. 

Forest Peoples Programme and Peruvian legal rights group Instituto de Defensa Legal (IDL) sent a letter to the Peruvian President asking him to guarantee Indigenous rights and to protect rights defenders.

Organizaciones indígenas se reúnen con congresistas y primera ministra demandando acciones de protección territorial y la continuación de un proyecto de titulación emblemático.

(Spanish only) The Shipibo-Konibo people in the community of Santa Clara de Uchunya, along with their representative organisation FECONAU, met with the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR) and the Peruvian state. The community highlighted the necessity for the concrete implementation of precautionary measures with an intercultural approach, due to the threats and harassment they are experiencing as a result of defending their land.

The Santa Clara de Uchunya community and its representative organisation - the Federation of Native Communities in Ucayali and Tributaries (FECONAU) - ask the IACHR to call on the Peruvian state about their lack of response within reasonable time to their case.

“La hidrovía amazónica no va y el pueblo indígena resistirá hasta el final”

This manual, through a series of concepts and guidelines, seeks to contribute to the safe exercise of the right to indigenous justice, prioritising the resolution of conflicts through traditional and peaceful mechanisms, and without contemplating violence or other types of aggression that could be used against them, whether through criminalisation by the state justice system or other types of harassment.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has granted precautionary measures to the indigenous Shipibo-Konibo community Santa Clara de Uchunya and to  the Federation of Native Communities of Ucayali, in the Peruvian Amazon.

In June 2020, a medical team was dispatched to Ocho Sur P’s oil palm plantation in the Peruvian Amazon to test workers for COVID-19. This action followed warnings about poor health and safety practices by this oil palm giant. Of those tested, 90% tested positive, embroiling the company in a series of administrative and criminal proceedings, this time for public health offences and forced labour.

This report finds that Indigenous Peoples impacted by the global commodity frontier frequently face intimidation for defending their collective rights and territories amidst the expansion of logging, industrial agriculture, extractive projects and investments, and narcotics production.

The Shipibo community is calling on the Peruvian Government to ensure the safety of community members who are experiencing intimidation and threats for taking direct action to stem the expansion of illegal logging and narcotics production in their territory.

Ocho Sur, a company dedicated to the production of oil palm in the region of Ucayali, has been working during the COVID-19 pandemic exposing the local population to the disease. Indigenous and human rights organisations have formally denounced this actions - just one of the many violations that the company has been systematically committing.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on the situation of human rights defenders, Michel Forst, has concluded his visit to Peru stating he is “appalled” by the criminalisation of environmental defenders.

On the 25 September 2019, two leaders of the Shipibo-Konibo indigenous people explained to the magistrates of Peru’s Constitutional Court why the community of Santa Clara de Uchunya were suing the Regional Government of Ucayali and its agricultural agency.

The UN has requested that the Regional Government of Ucayali cancel its plans to remove protections for a 3.5 million hectare area of Amazon rainforest. This would facilitate the invasion of indigenous Shipibo lands in Peru, and expose at least 100,000 hectares to immediate threat from settlers and agribusiness operations.

The indigenous community of Santa Clara de Uchunya has called upon major Scandinavian banks to use their influence as shareholders to insist that Alicorp removes Ocho Sur P from its palm oil supply chain.

Indigenous and human rights organisations in the Peruvian Amazon have filed a formal petition to the UN to appeal for urgent action to prevent the land grab and destruction of their lands. The action comes in response to the decision by the Regional Government of Ucayali to remove protections for 3.5 million hectares of Amazon rainforest and allow for the invasion of indigenous lands.

Indigenous communities very often face territorial threats which call for an agile response to avoid them escalating. In this second post of a two-part series, Miluska Elguera, who works alongside Kichwa communities in San Martin, Peru, shares how an innovative Early Response Fund mechanism is supporting grassroots responses to territorial conflicts.

The global sustainable palm oil body, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), has definitively rejected a formal complaint brought against one of its members, Peru’s largest consumer goods company, Alicorp S.A.A., for sourcing palm oil produced on a plantation which the RSPO itself has previously condemned.

Although they are the ancestral owners of the Peruvian Amazon, for centuries indigenous peoples have been dispossessed, displaced and even exterminated to guarantee the advance of highly lucrative extractive activities. Even today, indigenous Peruvians endure the plundering and destruction of their territories.